Research as a Service

Most organizations commit the budget, then go looking for the evidence.

Metanoia Systems runs the research function on your behalf. You bring the question. We design the study, build and validate the instruments, collect the data under registered ethics oversight, and hand back findings you can put in front of a board, a regulator, or your most skeptical executive and watch them hold.

Bring us your hardest question

IRB00015172
OHRP registered
SDVOSB
Social-Behavioral
AI Interactions
Data Approaches
System Modeling

Good In-House Research is Expensive

Organizations answer questions about revenue with instruments and controls. They answer questions about people by asking whoever is nearest and moving on. The result is a strategy that depends on assumptions about how customers, employees, and stakeholders think, none of which anyone has actually tested.

Building a research function in-house takes years and a headcount most organizations cannot justify for the three questions a year that genuinely warrant it. Routing the work through a university adds technology transfer processes, competing research priorities, and commercialization hurdles that outlast the decision you were trying to make.

Four disciplines, held together by one study design.

Behavioral science tells us what to measure. Complex adaptive systems science, the study of how organizations actually behave rather than how org charts say they should, tells us where to look. Human cognition research tells us how the answer will be received once it lands. Machine learning lets us examine existing literature at a scale no research team could cover by hand.

The literature, read at scale

Proprietary agent swarms, coordinated groups of AI agents each searching a slice of the problem, work across the indexed peer-reviewed record to establish what is already known. You get a viability estimate in days rather than a quarter of desk research.

Primary collection, built for your question

Where the literature runs out, we build and validate the instruments and collect the data ourselves, including targeted sensor and field collection. Every study involving people runs under our registered ethics review before a single participant is approached.

Scaffolded toward the next move

Findings arrive shaped for whatever comes after them: a prototype, a policy, an algorithm, a patent submission, or double-blind empirical validation. The research is designed backward from the decision it has to support.

Registered ethics review. Stated terms. No negotiation.

Metanoia runs its own registered Institutional Review Board, the formal ethics review that governs any legitimate study involving people. Registered with the federal Office for Human Research Protections and the National Institutes of Health, and compliant with the Common Rule at 45 CFR 46.

Two options for intellectual property, and only two. You own the results outright, or we take a five percent royalty. Stated up front, so the agreement takes days instead of a quarter.

A tenth of proceeds funds pro bono work. Studies published open access and prototypes released open source are eligible to draw on it.

You decide whether to proceed after step two, not before step one.

The viability estimate exists so that you can stop. Plenty of questions turn out to be answerable from the existing literature, or not answerable at the budget available. We would rather tell you that in week two than bill you through week twenty.

The question

One session. No commitment implied and no deck required. We tell you inside that hour whether this is a problem we are equipped to work on with you.

Viability estimate and work plan

Agent swarms establish what the existing record already answers. You receive a written estimate of whether the question can be answered, at what confidence, and what it would take. This is where you decide.

Study design and ethics review

We design the study, build the instruments, and validate them. Anything involving human participants goes to our registered IRB before collection begins.

Collection and analysis

Data collection runs under the approved protocol, then through the quantitative and qualitative methods the question actually calls for rather than the ones that are convenient.

Handoff

Findings are written for the people who have to act on them, with the recommended next step scoped and costed. If that step is a build, it moves to Skunkworks with the research already in hand.

Objects, not activities.

A written viability estimate with stated confidence and its limits

A work plan with scope, timeline, and cost before you commit

Study design and validated instruments, documented well enough to rerun

IRB protocol and approval documentation

The analyzed dataset, and the raw data behind it

Findings written for the audience that has to act on them

A scoped recommendation for the next step, including the option to stop

An executed IP agreement on stated terms, signed at the start

Who this is not for.

This Service is for you if:

The decision downstream is expensive enough to justify testing the assumption

You have no in-house research function, or yours is at capacity

The answer has to survive scrutiny from someone who did not want to hear it

The question is about how people think, decide, or behave

This may not be for you if:

The decision is already made and the research is meant to support it. We do not take that work.

You need a literature summary rather than a study. We will tell you that in the first session and point you to the sources.

You already know what needs building. Start at Skunkworks instead.

Where this leads next

Innovation and Skunkworks

Most innovation engagements produce a recommendation. Skunkworks produces a prototype. A cross-disciplinary team defines the problem, models the solution, and builds something functional in weeks, and you own everything when it is done.

Education & Training

One and two-day intensives that teach leadership teams to integrate AI deliberately and to recognize where the answer should be no. The curriculum sits on research run under our own registered ethics review. Teams leave with a written position they agree on, not a set of opinions.

Stop guessing about the people your strategy depends on.

There is a particular steadiness that comes from knowing your assumption was tested rather than inherited. The first conversation is a single session, and we will tell you inside the hour whether this is a problem we can help you with.

Bring us your hardest question